Crossings

Framing Note for Seminar Use

What follows replaces a general reading-group guide with a set of technical craft problems suitable for a graduate workshop or an advanced Art of Telling session. The governing premise is that Crossings, though written in free verse, is not metrically inert: it is built on a substrate of accentual-syllabic expectation that the poems exploit, substitute against, and periodically abandon outright. The discussion below assumes familiarity with scansion, the terminology of the foot (iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest, pyrrhic), caesura, enjambment, end-stopping, and asyndeton. Students should scan lines by ear against the page before consulting the analysis offered here — the commentary is meant to be argued with, not simply accepted.

I. Enjambment and the Suspended Clause

“Water” is the collection’s most rigorous enjambment exercise: the poem’s only finite verb clause does not arrive until its final line. Everything before it — “flaccid face, blue-water eyes, / rough sloped nose, broken capillaries / like tributaries on arid land” — is a chain of appositive noun phrases with no governing verb, so that the reader is held in a state of syntactic incompletion for nine lines before “Water he cannot reach” finally supplies both a verb and the poem’s argument. This is enjambment operating not merely at the level of image but at the level of the sentence itself: the poem is a single suspended periodic construction, its resolution withheld until the white space runs out.

Seminar exercise: Scan “Carol” for a subtler enjambment effect — the line “I don’t like contractions that apostrophes create” ends on a strong verb, “create,” inviting a reader to expect elaboration; the following line, “though I just used one,” undercuts that expectation. Identify at least two other places in the collection where a line-ending word generates a semantic expectation that the next line either fulfills or deliberately withholds.

II. Metrical Substitution

Because the collection is written in free verse, meter here functions locally and rhetorically rather than as a sustained governing pattern — what Annie Finch and others have called “iambic drift,” the tendency of English free verse to fall into iambic footing by default, against which substitutions register as marked events.

The clearest case is the closing line of “Dark City”: “I see you move from darkness into the light and beyond.” Scanned against its own iambic drift (I SEE / you MOVE / from DARK-/ness IN-/to the LIGHT / and be-YOND), the word darkness produces a trochaic substitution — a falling foot (DARK-ness) inverted against the line’s otherwise rising iambic pattern — landing precisely on the poem’s thematic low point before the meter rights itself into a run of iambs carrying the line “into the light and beyond.” The metrical inversion is not decorative; it enacts, at the level of the foot, the darkness the line is describing, before formally “rising” again into light.

A second case: “hands cupped bending” in “Water” produces a spondee (“hands cupped,” two adjacent stressed monosyllables) followed by a trochee (“bending”), a rhythmic clot that physically slows the line exactly where the old man’s gesture is most effortful. Compare this to the spondaic opening of “Your hands on mine” in “The Crosswalk” (YOUR HANDS, both stressed, before the iambic close “on mine”), where the same device weights physical evidence, preparing the line for the poem’s explicit claim: “Proof that we had closeness for a moment.”

Seminar exercise: Scan “Water” in full and identify every trochaic or spondaic substitution against the poem’s baseline of clipped, largely anapestic-to-iambic noun phrases. What pattern emerges regarding where substitutions cluster relative to the poem’s central image of an unreachable hand?

III. Caesura

The collection favors two distinct caesura types. The first is the mid-line dash, used almost exclusively in “Water” as a substitute for connective syntax: “On the dock—hands cupped bending.” The dash here does not simply pause the line; it removes the verb that would ordinarily bridge subject and predicate, so that the caesura performs the poem’s larger argument about disconnection.

The second caesura type is dialogic: a full stop immediately following reported speech, refusing elaboration. “Copacetic” builds its emotional climax almost entirely from this device: “‘I’m not hungry.’ He pushed it away.” The period closing the quotation, followed by a four-word narrative clause, produces a hard caesura that enacts the father’s refusal at the level of syntax.

Seminar exercise: Locate at least three additional dialogic caesuras in the collection (consider “Brother Mike,” “Last Supper,” “Shoes”) and characterize what emotional work each performs — evasion, refusal, tenderness withheld, or tenderness enacted through brevity.

IV. Subversion of Traditional Stanzaic Form

Most poems in Crossings use loosely organized verse paragraphs rather than a received stanzaic form, which makes the collection’s two departures from that norm significant by contrast. “To Be” abandons the sentence altogether for an asyndetic catalog — one image per line, no conjunctions, no punctuation connecting the items (“the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings / poor Yorick’s skull / Dickinson’s sherry in the glass”) — a formal choice that refuses the syntactic logic (and therefore the implied hierarchy) that even free verse ordinarily retains. The catalog form here does the specific work of leveling: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Fitzgerald, and O’Connor are given exactly the same syntactic weight as “a flattened sneaker on some road.”

“Moving Forward,” by contrast, closes the collection with short, parallel, anaphora-adjacent clauses — “touch a hand to show we care, / massage a pained foot, / or simply listen to someone’s despair” — that gesture toward the cadence of litany or prayer without adopting any received liturgical form outright. This is a subversion by approximation rather than by abandonment: the poem borrows the rhythmic authority of devotional repetition while declining to commit to the formal apparatus that would make the debt explicit.

Seminar exercise: Identify which formal principle — asyndetic leveling (as in “To Be”) or approximated litany (as in “Moving Forward”) — better describes the collection’s closing poem’s final six lines, and argue for what that closing formal choice implies about the collection’s stance on consolation.

V. Three Comparative Examples: Bridging Verse and Prose

The following pairs verse techniques from Crossings against passages from Mulhern’s short fiction, specifically “Assumptions,” to demonstrate how the same rhetorical principles migrate across genre boundaries — a central concern for students working in both forms.

Comparison 1 — Syntactic Suspension: Enjambment vs. the Periodic Sentence

In verse, “Water” suspends its single finite verb across nine lines of appositive noun phrases, withholding syntactic closure until the poem’s final clause. In prose, “Assumptions” performs the identical rhetorical maneuver at the level of the sentence rather than the line: its climactic sentence extends a main clause through a chain of subordinate comparisons before allowing it to close. Where the poem uses white space (the line break) as its suspension mechanism, the story uses subordination (successive dependent clauses) — different formal machinery serving an identical rhetorical goal: delaying resolution so that the accumulated modifiers arrive with more force than they would in a shorter, end-stopped sentence. This is the clearest demonstration in Mulhern’s work that enjambment is not a line-specific device but an instance of a broader technique — syntactic delay — available to both verse and prose.

Comparison 2 — Caesura as Withheld Explanation

In verse, “Copacetic” enacts a father’s refusal through a hard caesura: quoted dialogue closed by a period, followed immediately by a brief narrative clause that offers no elaboration — “‘I’m not hungry.’ He pushed it away.” In “Assumptions,” a grandmother’s evasive answer to a child’s question about religious mystery performs the same rhetorical closure in prose: a declarative sentence followed by a curt appositive that forecloses further explanation, functioning exactly as the line-internal caesura does in the poem. Note that in both cases, the caesura (verse) and the terminal short sentence (prose) are deployed at moments of adult evasion toward a child, suggesting the technique is tied, across genres, to a specific dramatic situation in Mulhern’s work: the adult who declines to explain.

Comparison 3 — Metrical Substitution as Stress-Timed Cadence

In verse, “Dark City” produces a trochaic substitution on the word “darkness” against an otherwise iambic line, the metrical inversion enacting the semantic content before the line’s rhythm rises again toward “light.” Prose cannot sustain a metrical pattern to substitute against, but it can manipulate stress-timing at the phrase level for comparable effect. The closing movement of “Assumptions” stacks accented syllables in tight sequence — a cluster of consecutive stresses that reads, to the ear, as a prose equivalent of the spondaic clot in “hands cupped bending” from “Water”: both instances slow the reader at the point of greatest thematic weight by refusing the ear the relief of an unstressed syllable. The lesson for students moving between forms is that meter, properly understood, is a special case of stress-timed emphasis; prose retains access to the emphasis even where it forfeits the sustained pattern.

Seminar exercise: Select one additional poem and one additional passage from Mulhern’s fiction and construct a fourth comparison of your own, using precise scansion or stress-marking rather than impressionistic description, in the manner of the three examples above.